Proteins are the indispensable catalytic workhorses, carrying out the processes essential to life in today's sophisticated organisms, but long ago ribonucleic acid (RNA) reigned supreme.

Researchers have produced an atomic picture that shows how two of these very old molecules interact with each other and it provides a rare glimpse into the transition from an ancient, RNA-based world to our present, protein-catalyst dominated world. 

Want to kill about 8,000 hours of your life?   Go to data.gov and start looking around.  In the interest of transparency (well, sometimes - see Recovery Accountability and Transparency meeting not open to the public), the Obama Administration has posted over 270,000 sets of raw data from its departments, agencies, and offices on the World Wide Web.

Good luck figuring it out, right?  The best place to hide stuff is in plain sight, skeptics will claim.

Nope, some folks at Rensselaer are here to make it simple.

Gad Saad, who likes to link evolution to consumption and marketing phenomena, says the length between the second and fourth finger is an indicator of high levels of prenatal testosterone and therefore risk-taking and potential financial success in adult men.

His hypothesis suggests that alpha males may take greater risks in relationships, in sports and in the financial markets, which we all sort of knew because that is the origin of the term 'alpha male'.   

As life expectancies increase, so does the number of elderly people undergoing surgical procedures.    Recently, there has been growing about potential neurotoxicity of anesthetics and their role in post-operative cognitive decline.

Alzheimer's Disease(AD) is a devastating disease most commonly found in elderly people. It is manifested by severe memory loss, language problems, impaired decision making and affected activities of daily living.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) has brought children to millions who otherwise had difficulty conceiving so it should be a happy time.   Yet over 20% of women who undergo IVF report symptoms of depression.

The belief has been that the common denominator in women who undergo IVF - hormone therapy - is the culprit, but new Tel Aviv University shows that other factors have a large influence in who gets depressed and why and resolving those issues will make the success of the IVF greater.

Children have more energy than adults but why is it that when walking children tire first?   

Do kids,  and perhaps even shorter adults, walk differently from taller people or do they tire faster for some other reason?  Max Kleiber's work on resting metabolic rates for different sized animals found that the bigger you are the slower each gram of tissue uses energy, but how and why metabolism is regulated that has been a puzzle.